Afghanistan President
Hamid Karzai sprang a surprise on Saturday by
affirming for the first time publicly that the
"United States is involved in peace talks with the
Taliban". The statement comes against the backdrop
of growing tensions over Washington's efforts to
get him to agree to a strategic partnership
agreement allowing permanent American and North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military
bases.

United States and Afghan drafts of
the agreement are sharply diverging. Karzai on
Saturday spelt out tough preconditions for
concluding a strategic partnership agreement:
"Foreign forces must become lawful, unilateral
operations must end, detentions of Afghans,
foreign forces must be conducted under Afghan laws,

foreign assistance must be
channeled through [the] Afghan government."

Furthermore, as part of any deal, he said:
"Afghanistan wants a fully-equipped army to
include F-16 planes in return for strategic ties
with the US."

Karzai was speaking just
ahead of US President Barack Obama's announcement
on the drawdown of American troops in July, with
reports suggesting that the Pentagon seeks a mere
notional withdrawal at this stage so that the
"surge" can effectively continue through 2012.

Karzai's interests are at odds with the
Pentagon's priorities. He has refrained from
explicitly condemning the "surge" but instead
harps on the excesses by the troops under the
command of General David Petraeus, the US's top
man in Afghanistan. He sees the "surge" as leading
to nowhere but more bloodshed and destruction, and
Afghan alienation.

Karzai exposed the US's
maneuver to hold direct talks with the Taliban
while finding an alibi to continue the "surge".
The United Nations Security Council on Friday
decided to split the sanctions regime of the
Taliban from al-Qaeda and made a provision to
remove sanctions on some Taliban leaders. The US
ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice said, "The US
believes that the new sanctions regime for
Afghanistan will serve as an important tool to
promote reconciliation ... [It] sent a clear
message to the Taliban that there is a future ..."

But Karzai made it clear that it is
America's show and he has no role in the
US-Taliban talks. "The foreign forces [NATO],
especially America, are carrying out the talks by
themselves. From the government side, we don't
have any negotiations with them." Evidently, he
feels irritated that the US has undercut him.

Blackmail boomeranged Karzai is
today in the unhappy position of learning from the
Americans how things are going on the peace front.
On the other hand, non-Pashtun elements belonging
to the erstwhile Northern Alliance are training
their guns on him, accusing him of a "sell out" to
the Taliban. Karzai knows well enough that some of
these self-styled opposition figures, such as
former intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh or former
foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, enjoy US
patronage. Karzai feels frustrated about overall
US intentions.

The Americans lately began
spreading the news that Karzai intends to retire
from politics when his term ends in 2014. Indeed,
direct US-Taliban deals will eventually make
Karzai expendable in Afghan politics by 2014. But
he is determined not to be a pushover and may not
hesitate to work on shared interests with even
Pakistan, which is also out of the loop on the
Anglo-American enterprise to engage the Taliban.
Karzai pointedly said that the role of Pakistan in
the reconciliation process was "very important".

Karzai is digging in with the
preconditions for concluding the strategic
partnership agreement with the US. The nearest he
came so far was at a press conference held in the
presidential palace in Kabul on April 11:

We have put across to them our
several preconditions and we have tied up their
hands and feet ... Conditions regarding US
assistance, flawed military operations and
others which [presently] have been preventing
the Afghan government from strengthening as well
as legalizing the presence of the foreign forces
are mentioned in the draft sent to the US
officials. If America wants relations with us,
it should accept our conditions, which are
logical.

Unsurprisingly, the Obama
administration is furious. The strategic
partnership agreement is today the most important
aspect of the US's relationship with Karzai. It
will determine the US's political, military and
economic ties with Afghanistan for decades to come
and it is integral to the US's regional strategies
in Central Asia against Russia and China.

The Obama administration's expectation was
that the agreement could be signed by July and
that Karzai's preconditions amounted to mere
grandstanding to extract financial concessions.
(Karzai insists that the US's future assistance
should be routed through his government. The
volume of money could run into billions of
dollars). The Obama administration is testing
Karzai's resilience.

Investigations into
fraudulent practices by Kabul Bank have provided a
timely handle for Washington to corner Karzai,
since influential Afghan politicians aligned with
him have been implicated in the scandal. Karzai
maintains that the crisis arose in the first
instance because of bad advice from the West about
international banking practices. Anyway, the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) stepped into the
case and brusquely rejected the Karzai
government's plan to salvage the bank.

This means a freeze on the disbursal of
funds from the World-Bank administered Afghan
Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF), as an IMF
support package is a seal of approval that most
donors expect before pledging aid. Karzai's
government is heading for a cash crunch and may
find it difficult to disburse salaries of
government employees.

The ARTF was
expected to funnel US$200 million this year for
payment of salaries. Britain stopped aid disbursal
in March. Amid all this, Obama initiated a video
conference with Karzai last week during which he
apparently expressed concern over the banking
crisis and explicitly linked it to the long-term
relationship between the US and Afghanistan. But
Karzai is resisting US pressure. He deputed
Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal on a 12-day visit
to Moscow to find some debt relief from Russia.

Regional networkingClearly,
the fault lines are widening even as negotiations
over the status of forces agreement resumed in
Kabul on Saturday with a visiting American
delegation.

The Americans may be
misreading that the discord with Karzai boils down
to his perceived "rentier" mentality, and that
through IMF pressure and offers of money, he could
be persuaded. Washington may be making a grave
miscalculation about the Afghan sense of honor.

It overlooks that slowly, steadily, the US
is losing its monopoly of conflict resolution in
Afghanistan and Karzai can no longer be kept away
from networking with regional powers. Karzai's
defiant stance on Saturday comes soon after his
return to Kabul from attending the summit meeting
of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in
Astana.

The SCO summit adopted a statement
on Wednesday calling for an "independent, neutral"
Afghanistan (read: free of foreign occupation).
Nurusultan Nazarbayev, president of Kazakhstan,
who hosted Karzai, put it on record, "It is
possible that the SCO will assume responsibility
for many issues in Afghanistan after the
withdrawal of coalition forces in 2014."

Saturday also happened to be an
extraordinary day with Iranian Defense Minister
Ahmad Vahidi arriving in Kabul - an unprecedented
visit in the history of Afghan-Iranian relations -
"to explore ways for the further expansion of ties
between the two neighboring states". Vahidi's
visit unmistakably represents a big snub to the
Obama administration.

Vahidi waded
straight into the post-2014 status of the US
occupation of Afghanistan. He told Karzai,
"Ensuring regional stability will be possible only
by the collective efforts of regional countries
and the withdrawal of foreign forces."

Meanwhile, Karzai has already initiated
moves to hold a loya jirga (grand council)
soon after Eid. As things stand, the likelihood of
such a traditional tribal council approving
permanent US/NATO military bases is remote. The
Afghan people militate against foreign occupation
of their country.

The American game plan
was to muster enough support in the Afghan
parliament for the strategic agreement. But a
loya jirga is a different ball game
altogether. In his remarks on Saturday, which were
nationally telecast, Karzai said, "They [US-led
NATO forces] are here for their own purposes, for
their own goals, and they are using our soil for
that." He is appealing to Afghan nationalism.

In sum, the Obama administration sees the
conclusion of the strategic agreement with Karzai,
direct US-Taliban talks and the drawdown of troops
in July as inter-related vectors of a wholesome
process where Washington will be in total command
- ably assisted by London. Obama will find it a
bitter pill to swallow to accept that Afghan laws
will prevail over the conduct of his troops.
Karzai defiantly claims it is his prerogative
to decide on the "surge" operations by NATO and US
foreign forces. Karzai insists that reconciliation
of the Taliban should be "Afghan-led" so that his
leadership is not in jeopardy and he links the US
long-term troop presence to preconditions so that
the Americans will have to depend on him and learn
to work under his leadership rather than vice
versa.

He threatens to go to the Afghan
people unless the US meets the preconditions.
Karzai counts on a balancing role by the regional
powers in the Afghan endgame. Interestingly, on
Saturday, he slammed NATO's military intervention
in Libya.

Ambassador M K
Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the
Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included
the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and
Turkey.